was doing for the Tennants what

2021/05/21

He was doing for the Tennants what he would have done for any of his corporate clients pulling permits, studying land deeds and requesting from DuPont all documentation related to Dry Run Landfill but he could find no evidence that explained what was happening to the cattle. Now we had a scientific answer.. It dont look like anything Ive been into before.. But if you are a sentient being reading this article in 2016, you already have PFOA in your blood. Tennant burly and nearly six feet tall, wearing jeans, a plaid flannel shirt and a baseball cap did not resemble a typical Taft client. DuPont even gave him a free supply of PFOA, which, Darlene says, she used as soap in the familys dishwasher and to clean the car. The fine represented less than 2 percent of the profits earned by DuPont on PFOA that year. Dozens of boxes containing thousands of unorganized documents began to arrive at Tafts headquarters: private internal correspondence, medical and health reports and confidential studies conducted by DuPont scientists. Fortunately they had recently bought 66 acres from a low-level employee at the Washington Works facility that would do perfectly. We have no idea what were taking., Bilott doesnt regret fighting DuPont for the last 16 years, nor for letting PFOA consume his career. There was scant information available about its impact on large populations. This point was made to Terp by Bernard Reilly, DuPonts in-house lawyer, according to accounts from Bilotts plaintiffs-lawyer colleagues; they say Reilly called to demand that Bilott back off the case. The scientists designed 12 studies, including one that, using sophisticated environmental modeling technology, determined exactly how much PFOA each individual class member had ingested. The thought that DuPont could get away with this for this long, Bilott says, his tone landing halfway between wonder and rage, that they could keep making a profit off it, then get the agreement of the governmental agencies to slowly phase it out, only to replace it with an alternative with unknown human effects we told the agencies about this in 2001, and theyve essentially done nothing. Im not allowed to talk to you, they said, when confronted. Weve taken the cap off something here. The whole business might have ended right there. The first of their three sons was born two years later. I had the impression that it was extremely tough on him, Winter says. It was to be incinerated or sent to chemical-waste facilities. This means that local water districts are under no obligation to tell customers whether PFOA is in their water. It was the kind of stuff you always heard about happening but you never thought youd see written down.. His father was a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, and Bilott spent most of his childhood moving among air bases near Albany; Flint, Mich.; Newport Beach, Calif.; and Wiesbaden, West Germany. The obvious next step was to file a class-action lawsuit against DuPont on behalf of everyone whose water was tainted by PFOA. 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The attacks recurred periodically, bringing blurry vision, slurred speech and difficulty moving one side of his body. The team of epidemiologists was flooded with medical data, and there was nothing DuPont could do to stop it. PFOA was not a regulated substance. I just tried to get the best job I could. Dont take anything at face value. office finally took his call. Before that letter, corporations could rely upon the public misperception that if a chemical was dangerous, it was regulated. Under the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, the E.P.A.

3M invented PFOA just four years earlier; it was used to keep coatings like Teflon from clumping during production. In Little Hocking, the water tested positive for PFOA at seven times the limit. With the trial looming, Bilott stumbled upon a letter DuPont had sent to the E.P.A. If the scientific panel found no link with diseases, wed have to eat it all., Clients called Bilott to say that they had received diagnoses of cancer or that a family member had died. But it was to me. The same DuPont lawyers tasked with writing the safety limit, Bilott said, had become the government regulators responsible for enforcing that limit. The legal fees had granted him a reprieve, but as the years passed without resolution, and Bilott continued to spend the firms money and was unable to attract new clients, he found himself in an awkward position. Until the scientific study came back with its results, class members were forbidden from filing personal-injury suits against DuPont. Bilott found the figure mind-blowing. The toxicologists he hired had settled upon a safety limit of 0.2 parts per billion. Discussions were held at DuPonts corporate headquarters to discuss switching to the new compound. Bilott counseled class members in West Virginia and Ohio and traveled frequently to Washington to attend meetings at the E.P.A., which was deciding whether to issue advisories about PFOA. DuPont, he said, had found out that PFOA was causing health problems for women and birth defects in children. About nine months earlier, he received a peculiar note from the Lubeck water district. The note explained that an unregulated chemical named PFOA had been detected in the drinking water in low concentrations, but that it was not a health risk. But they were so afraid that they were willing to roll the dice.. Terps team at Taft was a leader in the field. I learned to question everything you read, he said. I think about the clients who have been waiting for this, many of whom are sick or have died while waiting. Just months before Rob Bilott made partner at Taft Stettinius & Hollister, he received a call on his direct line from a cattle farmer. Sometimes her husband came home from work sick fever, nausea, diarrhea, vomiting after working in one of the PFOA storage tanks. Tennant always zoomed in on his cows eyes. can test chemicals only when it has been provided evidence of harm. In September 2004, DuPont decided to settle the class-action suit. I knew nobody who had ever worked at a firm, nobody who knew anything about it. He believed that the DuPont chemical company, which until recently operated a site in Parkersburg that is more than 35 times the size of the Pentagon, was responsible. The risk was too great: Products manufactured with PFOA were an important part of DuPonts business, worth $1 billion in annual profit. They wanted to know why it was taking so long. Bilott is currently prosecuting Wolf v. DuPont, the second of the personal-injury cases filed by the members of his class. Its infuriating., As part of its agreement with the E.P.A., DuPont ceased production and use of PFOA in 2013. Robs letter lifted the curtain on a whole new theater, says Harry Deitzler, a plaintiffs lawyer in West Virginia who works with Bilott. Taft continued to pay consultants to interpret the new findings and relay them to the epidemiologists. Its about high time that someone in the state department of something-or-another got off their cans., At one point, the video cuts to a skinny red cow standing in hay. His doctors didnt know what was happening. Still the panel was quiet. They had seven cows then. With the Famous Letter, Bilott crossed a line. DuPont did not make this information public. In 1961, DuPont researchers found that the chemical could increase the size of the liver in rats and rabbits. These were bad facts. He had seen what the PFOA-tainted drinking water had done to cattle. Nevertheless, as a favor to his grandmother, he agreed to meet the farmer. One laboratory study suggested possible DNA damage from PFOA exposure, and a study of workers linked exposure with prostate cancer. It is in your parents blood, your childrens blood, your lovers blood. What did the insides of their heads look like? He did not have a typical Taft rsum. They knew this stuff was harmful, and they put it in the water anyway.

But West Virginia endorsed the new standard. Terp, his supervisor, recalls him as a real standout lawyer: incredibly bright, energetic, tenacious and very, very thorough. He was a model Taft lawyer. I may have been the first one to actually go through them all. I dont even like the looks of them, he says. Theyre trying to cover this stuff up. in leadership positions. Lets put it that way.. I couldnt blame the Tennants for getting angry.. He worked long hours and knew few people in Cincinnati. He became an expert on the Environmental Protection Agencys regulatory framework, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act. that mentioned a substance at the landfill with a cryptic name: PFOA. In all his years working with chemical companies, Bilott had never heard of PFOA. In August 2000, Bilott called DuPonts lawyer, Bernard Reilly, and explained that he knew what was going on. He was amazed that Bilott would sue DuPont while remaining at Taft. He became the consummate insider. Now when they saw the farmers, they charged. There were more than 110,000 pages in all, some half a century old. Meanwhile the E.P.A., drawing from Bilotts research, began its own investigation into the toxicity of PFOA. In the 1970s, DuPont discovered that there were high concentrations of PFOA in the blood of factory workers at Washington Works. Bilotts strategy appeared to have worked. The blood run out of their noses and out their mouths. How could the class prove it had been harmed by PFOA when the health effects were largely unknown? Or DuPont can fight each suit individually, a tactic that tobacco companies have used to fight personal-injury lawsuits. He hadnt really thought about the ethics of it, to be honest. But his father, who late in life enrolled in law school, encouraged Bilott to do the same. Each organ is sliced open, and Wilbur points out unusual discolorations some dark, some green and textures. Or you might have drunk tainted water. At Taft, he asked to join Thomas Terps environmental team. I liked that philosophy. Bilott studied political science and wrote his thesis about the rise and fall of Dayton. It did not appear on any list of regulated materials, nor could he find it in Tafts in-house library. DuPont rechristened the plot Dry Run Landfill, named after the creek that ran through it. It was a common occurrence at Washington Works. The gap allowed DuPont to claim that it had done nothing wrong. Bilott spent the next few months on the floor of his office, poring over the documents and arranging them in chronological order. In 1991, DuPont scientists determined an internal safety limit for PFOA concentration in drinking water: one part per billion. Tennant had tried to seek help locally, he said, but DuPont just about owned the entire town. He hoped to become a city manager. An interoffice memo sent in 1993 announced that for the first time, we have a viable candidate that appeared to be less toxic and stayed in the body for a much shorter duration of time. We complemented each other.. It was a brief conversation. All told, 70,000 people were drinking poisoned water. Darlene says the men at the plant called it Teflon flu., In 1976, after Darlene gave birth to their second child, her husband told her that he was not allowed to bring his work clothes home anymore. Then a fourth, a fifth, a sixth. Bilott had what he needed. DuPont freaked out when they realized that this guy was onto them, says Ned McWilliams, a young trial lawyer who later joined Bilotts legal team. It had the quality of a horror movie. It also bound to plasma proteins in the blood, circulating through each organ in the body. The Environmental Working Group has found manufactured fluorochemicals present in 94 water districts across 27 states (see sidebar beginning on Page 38). This did not sit well with the Tennants, who began to suffer the consequences of antagonizing Parkersburgs main employer. This cows done a lot of suffering, he would say, as a blinking eye filled the screen. claimed that it would announce a lifetime health advisory level for PFOA by early 2016.. DuPont, rather than use an alternative compound, built a new factory in Fayetteville, N.C., to manufacture the substance for its own use. A plaintiff needs to prove only that he or she has been exposed to a toxin. The scientists, freed from the restraints of academic budgets and grants, had hit the epidemiological jackpot: an entire populations personal data and infinite resources available to study them. Im a firm believer that our work on the plaintiffs side makes us better defense lawyers.. For this reason, Bilott filed the class-action suit in August 2001 in state court, even though four of the six affected water districts lay across the Ohio border. In 2002, the agency released its initial findings: PFOA might pose human health risks not only to those drinking tainted water, but also to the general public anyone, for instance, who cooked with Teflon pans. Ten years earlier, Congress passed the legislation known as Superfund, which financed the emergency cleanup of hazardous-waste dumps. You cant ignore the economic realities of the ways that business is run and the way clients think. There was a threat that the firm would suffer financially. When I asked Thomas Terp about Tafts reaction to the Famous Letter, he replied, not quite convincingly, that he didnt recall one. Sarah doesnt remember him speaking. We see a situation, Joe Kiger says, that has gone from Washington Works, to statewide, to the United States, and now its everywhere, its global. The story began in 1951, when DuPont started purchasing PFOA (which the company refers to as C8) from 3M for use in the manufacturing of Teflon. In fact, it was another term of the settlement that DuPont would fund the research without limitation. If no correlation was found between PFOA and illness, Bilotts clients would be barred under the terms of the agreement from filing any personal-injury cases. It might establish a precedent for suing corporations over unregulated substances and imperil Tafts bottom line. After the settlement, the legal team pushed to make receipt of the cash award contingent on a full medical examination. A federal court denied it. Not long after the sale, Wilbur told Bilott, the cattle began to act deranged.

That trial begins in March. would commission a study of the property, conducted by three veterinarians chosen by DuPont and three chosen by the E.P.A. This may have ramifications well beyond Bartletts case: Hers is one of five bellwether cases that will be tried over the course of this year. The same creek flowed down to a pasture where the Tennants grazed their cows.

There was a reason why I was interested in helping out the Tennants, he said after a pause. Bilott could not believe the scale of incriminating material that DuPont had sent him. I wouldnt be surprised if he got a raise.. He had been spurned not only by Parkersburgs lawyers but also by its politicians, journalists, doctors and veterinarians. DuPont could argue and had argued that even if PFOA caused medical problems, it was only because factory workers had been exposed at exponentially higher levels than neighbors who drank tainted water. He felt secure enough at Taft for Barlage to quit her job and raise their children full-time. But over the decades that followed, DuPont pumped hundreds of thousands of pounds of PFOA powder through the outfall pipes of the Parkersburg facility into the Ohio River. (In a statement, DuPont claimed that it did volunteer health information about PFOA to the E.P.A. DuPont worked for more than a decade, with oversight from regulators, to introduce its alternatives. Some had been doing so for decades. To think that youve negotiated in good faith a deal that everybody has abided by and worked on for seven years, you reach a point where certain things were to be resolved but then remain contested, he says. My first impression was that he was not like other guys, she says. He understood PFOAs history as well as anyone inside DuPont did. When asked for evidence, it forwarded two letters written to West Virginian government agencies from 1982 and 1992, both of which cited internal studies that called into question links between PFOA exposure and human health problems.). But the crucial discovery for the Tennant case was this: By the late 1980s, as DuPont became increasingly concerned about the health effects of PFOA waste, it decided it needed to find a landfill for the toxic sludge dumped on company property. By 1990, DuPont had dumped 7,100 tons of PFOA sludge into Dry Run Landfill. It just felt like the right thing to do, he says today. What the hell is that stuff doing in your water? He sent Kiger information about the Tennant lawsuit. These include many products that are stain-resistant, waterproof or nonstick., When asked about the Madrid Statement, Dan Turner, DuPonts head of global media relations, wrote in an email: DuPont does not believe the Madrid Statement reflects a true consideration of the available data on alternatives to long-chain perfluorochemicals, such as PFOA. You could realize how bad that looks. But its not going to be covered up, because Im going to bring it out in the open for people to see., The video shows a large pipe running into the creek, discharging green water with bubbles on the surface. I suppose it wasnt so amazing to my fellow counsel in West Virginia who know the system there. Discover more about the small businesses partnering with Amazon and Amazons commitment to empowering them. Now, they realized, there was a way to do so. For a corporation to seek a gag order to prevent somebody from speaking to the E.P.A. 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It arrived on Halloween day, enclosed in the monthly water bill. I started seeing a story, Bilott said. Surprising his professors, he chose to attend law school at Ohio State, where his favorite course was environmental law. In 1973 she brought him to the cattle farm belonging to the Tennants neighbors, the Grahams, with whom White was friendly. His taking on the Tennant case, Winter says, given the type of practice Taft had, I found to be inconceivable.. My family said that a big firm was where youd get the most opportunities, he said.

It would fund a scientific study to determine whether there was a probable link a term that delicately avoided any declaration of causation between PFOA and any diseases. The class voted in favor of this approach, and within months, nearly 70,000 West Virginians were trading their blood for a $400 check.

I learned how these companies work, how the laws work, how you defend these claims, he said. Bilott spent the weekend riding horses, milking cows and watching Secretariat win the Triple Crown on TV. Price and other details may vary based on product size and color. What was it doing to the tens of thousands of people in the areas around Parkersburg who drank it daily from their taps? Since they dont want to get involved, Ill have to dissect this thing myself. How did it get there?

Bilott devised a new legal strategy. Where scientists have tested for the presence of PFOA in the world, they have found it. Theres something really bad going on here.. Four different times, the Tennants changed churches. He met with professors individually and came to value critical thinking. Class members were concerned about three things, Winter says. I perceived that there were some What the hell are you doing? responses.. Were their internal organs green? It contained an extraordinarily high concentration of PFOA. Against DuPonts protests, the order was granted. Bilott sought help with the Tennant case from a West Virginia lawyer named Larry Winter. Hes extremely stubborn. Their report did not find DuPont responsible for the cattles health problems. DuPont did not tell this to the Tennants at the time, nor did it disclose the fact in the cattle report that it commissioned for the Tennant case a decade later the report that blamed poor husbandry for the deaths of their cows. They didnt understand how he could join a corporate firm. Kiger had underlined statements that he found particularly baffling, like: DuPont reports that it has toxicological and epidemiological data to support confidence that exposure guidelines established by DuPont are protective of human health. The term support confidence seemed bizarre, as did protective of human health, not to mention the claim that DuPonts own data supported its confidence in its own guidelines. The law firm was in the business of representing chemical corporations, not suing them. Bilott sent his entire case file to the E.P.A. This arrangement, which largely allows chemical companies to regulate themselves, is the reason that the E.P.A. In 2001, it could not even be proved that exposure to PFOA in public drinking water caused health problems. Bilott hunted through his files for other references to PFOA, which he learned was short for perfluorooctanoic acid. It was one of those things where you cant believe youre reading what youre reading, he said. Though nominally representing the Tennants their settlement had yet to be concluded Bilott spoke for the public, claiming extensive fraud and wrongdoing. DuPont plans to appeal. DuPonts continuing refusal to accept responsibility is maddening to Bilott. It was stressful, Sarah Barlage, Bilotts wife, says. Extensive data has been developed, demonstrating that these alternatives are much more rapidly eliminated from the body than PFOA, and have improved health safety profiles. DuPonts own instructions specified that it was not to be flushed into surface water or sewers. Residents of Issaquah, Wash.; Wilmington, Del. But Bilott was not satisfied. Lifelong friends ignored the Tennants on the streets of Parkersburg and walked out of restaurants when they entered. Among the Madrid scientists recommendations: Enact legislation to require only essential uses of PFASs and Whenever possible, avoid products containing, or manufactured using, PFASs.

The prospect of taking on DuPont did cause us pause, Terp concedes. If such links existed, DuPont would pay for medical monitoring of the affected group in perpetuity. They hauled cardboard boxes containing videotapes, photographs and documents into the firms glassed-in reception area on the 18th floor, where they sat in gray midcentury-modern couches beneath an oil portrait of one of Tafts founders. He demanded immediate action to regulate PFOA and provide clean water to those living near the factory. Two: If I do, is it harmful? He mastered the chemistry of the pollutants, despite the fact that chemistry had been his worst subject in high school. After that, DuPont may choose to settle with every afflicted class member, using the outcome of the bellwether cases to determine settlement awards. The same year, DuPont found that water in one local district contained PFOA levels at three times that figure. I dont think I had any clue of what that involved.. He asked DuPont to share all documentation related to the substance; DuPont refused. The doctors asked whether he was under heightened stress at work. On March 6, 2001, he sent the letter to the director of every relevant regulatory authority, including Christie Whitman, administrator of the E.P.A., and the United States attorney general, John Ashcroft. Of seven births, two had eye defects. Rob Bilott on land owned by the Tennants near Parkersburg, W.Va.CreditBryan Schutmaat for The New York Times. There are 60,000 unregulated chemicals out there right now. Bilott had anticipated suing on behalf of the one or two water districts closest to Washington Works. They struck suddenly, without warning, and their effects lasted days. Rob is a private person.